New York, NY

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Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs, and Jim Macpherson played their first show together on Friday June 19, 1992, in a snooker hall behind Warrington Rugby Club in the north of England, near Manchester. Two days later they supported Nirvana in Dublin and Belfast, and then played at Glastonbury. Back in the US, after playing 27 sold-out shows that fall, they made their way to San Francisco to record Last Splash.

Released August 30, 1993, on 4AD, reviewers described Last Splash as ”effervescent,” “blistering,” and “incoherent.” At its center is the infectiously appealing, instantly recognizable “Cannonball.” Propelled in part by the video directed by Kim Gordon and Spike Jonze, the song was voted Single of the Year by the NME. After more than two years on the road, they played their last show on September 5th, 1994, at Lollapalooza in Los Angeles.

In 2013 they will play together again for the first time.

In June they will perform Last Splash live at ATP, curated by Deerhunter, at Camber Sands in the UK. More dates to be announced.

4AD will release LSXX, a Deluxe Anniversary Edition of Last Splash, in April 2013.

Attention came swiftly following Speedy Ortiz’s 2012 Sports EP on the Boston-centric label Exploding In Sound, and with good reason. Massachusetts-based songwriter/guitarist Sadie Dupuis’ knotty, lyrically dense songs were fully realized by her bandmates, with intricate guitar lines crisscrossing over Darl Ferm’s fluid bass and Mike Falcone’s precisely executed drumming in a way that was simultaneously catchy and jarring. After the success of its 2013 Best New Music-honored debut full-length Major Arcana, the band formalized its assault through a year and a half of relentless touring with bands in whose brainy-slash-brawny legacies it followed—among them Stephen Malkmus & The Jicks, Ex Hex, and The Breeders. In 2014, the band added guitarist Devin McKnight of the Boston-based post-punk group Grass Is Green, whose guitar parts both match and challenge Dupuis’.

Speedy Ortiz’s second proper album—Foil Deer, recorded at Rare Book Room in Brooklyn when the band wasn’t pushing forward on its hectic 2014 tour schedule—comes out on April 21, 2015. The songs represent a leap forward, possessing a lightness that mirrors Dupuis’s post-grad school outlook; they also have a deliberate nature to them, one that emanates from extra studio time and more experimentation with the band’s essential form. (Ferm contributes a few unexpected guitar parts; Falcone’s vocal harmonies zing in with more force.) Speedy Ortiz possesses big-tent rock swagger and punk’s restless yet intimate spirit in a way that makes the impulses seem identical; while the quartet can still command crowds at festivals like Primavera Sound and Pitchfork Music Festival, they also relish playing Boston’s teeming basements alongside the city’s next generation of bands. That willingness to push not just forward, but in all directions, makes Speedy Ortiz one of rock’s most exciting outfits.